The multimodal constitution of objects: how church viewing is accomplished

Based on a single case analysis, this essay examines the question of what the structure of a church viewing is like. Within a theoretical framework which conceptualizes the church viewing as a cultural practice, “object constitution” is regarded as a central aspect and as a visitor ’s active achievement. For the composition of the church viewings corpus, visitors were not only filmed whilst walking through the church interior and visually perceiving certain aspects of the architecture, but were also asked to verbally comment their visual perceptions. The church viewing corpus was recorded with two cameras: an action camera, documenting from the church visitors’ perspective; the other a contextual camera following the visitors on their way through the church interior. This experimental design, which uses the verbal commenting of the visitors’ own perception as a scientific method, allows reconstructing their church viewing concepts as a dynamic interplay of their visual selection und perception of the church interior and the verbal commenting of their visual perception. The single case analysis proves that object constitution is in fact a visitor ’s active accomplishment by which parts of the church interior are brought forth in a new way: Anton, the analysed visitor, who examines in detail two large paintings hanging on the wall, constitutes them as “picture frames”.